The work of Francesco Diluca in these years must have been both painful and demanding.
His lucid view of reality has been merciless in describing our contemporary men.
Being fully conscious of the reality around him, the truth Montale was expressing in the verse at the beginning, his work inevitably focused on this empty humanity that, in his opinion, had lost all substance.
This is not an easy topic to tackle and it is certainly not easy to even contemplate narrate it through the medium of sculpture.How we can represent man as absent to himself?
Diluca chooses to present us a with empty cocoons that lead us to perceive the echo of what was once there and may yet remain in everyday life but no longer exists as a tangibe presence.
The results dramatically striking because these chrysalises are beautiful, glazed and shining white with extremely careful detailng. Yet like bandages wrapped around a mummy, the man once held held within is now totally absent – lost and reduced to dust.
The outline is still there but what is lacking is the very essence of being: the missing figures have lost track of the sense of their actions.
Yet the perceptive sense of the artis oblige him to go beyond merely establishing the fact, and remain alert to pick up the signal that will enable him to grasp where this regression may lead, in the profound hope that he may believe this is not the last word to be spoken by contemporary man.
Over the last few years something has changed in Diluca’s work. Something has reversed the parabola and the absent figures. So, as if from nowhere, some faint hope seems to arise as in his work Attesa – Waiting in which the vivd colour of a red flower emerges from the greyness of a body that has almost completely dissolved, and the unstoppable force of life stikes us.
From the dark, from the dust new human figures emerge that are roughly modelled and recreated from numerous small butterflies that fly and settle and together form bodies that slowly gain substance; These fragile, ethereal butterflies symbolise that hope may once again be born for the human kind.